Business says video most effective

It is an otherwise gloomy outlook for business with consumers spending less. Both offline and online marketing strategies delivering disappointing results for business. However, there does appear to be a silver lining shining through; video.

A recent interview with Schwab's Mike Naughton, VP of media and central marketing has put a focus on the effectiveness of video showing a 20% increase in consumer response over nonvideo online campaigns (banner) as reported by emarketer.

"We noticed that consumer interaction with video ads [in the “Talk to Chuck” online campaign, which ran from September to December 2008] was 20% higher than it was with nonvideo creative."

These results are being repeated with great predictabiltiy. Therefore it is no surprise that business is positioning their marketing strategy around these impressive statistics.

A study by Reardon Smith Whitaker and recently releaseed in emarketer shows clearly that online is a priority for advertisers and marketers, but in a consistent trend, banner advertisment (nonvideo) has fallen significantly out of favour.

Top Tactics for 2009 - eMarketer via kwout

PermissionTV also conducted a survey of advertisers to gauge the “tactics on which US marketers plan to focus their online marketing budget in 2009”, with the top response being video.

• 66.8% of marketers suggested that video would be their among their priorities for 2009,
• versus 22.8% for banner advertising.

Though most of the statistics are based on U.S. data they are no less credible when applied to global or more specifically Asian markets. Asian online spend is growing at a pace impossible in the sated North American and European markets. It stands to reason that by logical extension, a trend that is siginificant in North America and Europe becomes history making in a market like China.